Twice in the last three months, Summer Allen has traveled across several states with her son Miles and husband Christian, cared for the busy 14-month-old child in a hotel room, and then hit a running track or cross country course to become a first team All-American.

Her two-sport feat happened months apart because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is just one of several massive detours in Allen’s running career at Weber State that she simply could not have envisioned or anticipated when she committed to WSU as Summer Harper out of Orem High School.

Not only is she a first team All-American this season in both cross country and track and field, with the 3,000-meter steeplechase her event in the latter sport, but her races in Eugene, Oregon, last week broke a substantial record and got her a ticket to return to Hayward Field at the University of Oregon this Sunday for the U.S. Olympic Trials.

In the semifinal race June 10 at the NCAA national championships, Allen ran the steeplechase in 9:37.48, the sixth-best overall time in the preliminary races that were regarded as the fastest women’s steeplechase races in NCAA history.

That broke Lindsey Anderson’s Weber State and Big Sky Conference event record from 2007, a mark of 9:39.95 that, at the time, was the NCAA national record set by a future Olympian.

Two days later, Allen finished eighth in the NCAA final.

That came three months after she finished seventh at the NCAA’s national championship cross country meet in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she ran the 6,000-meter race in 20:23.30. That seventh-place finish smashed WSU’s all-time best finish of 24th in 1997.

Those two finishes automatically earned her the status as a first team All-American in both sports, completing a goal she set in 2019 when she was four months pregnant.

Allen runs a 3,000-meter steeplechase preliminary race in the Olympic Trials at 7:35 p.m. MDT Sunday. If she finishes in the top 12, she will race again on June 24, with the top three finishers making the Olympic team.

“I’m just really grateful. It’s exciting,” Allen told the Standard-Examiner. “After the finals at nationals I was kind of hoping to place higher than eighth but, when I reminded myself how far I’d come and that I reached my goal, I just couldn’t complain at all. It’s way better than I could have possibly imagined.

“It took such a long time but it was worth it because I didn’t give up. To do it now after all these setbacks, I feel like it’s more rewarding than if I had just always been an All-American every year.”

NBC and NBC Sports Network will carry television coverage of the U.S. Olympic Trials.

Allen, a graduate in exercise and sports science now eyeing the start of her Master’s of education program, began her Weber State career in 2013 and won the Big Sky’s cross country championship. She committed to WSU despite her Utah County roots and siblings who ran at BYU and Utah Valley.

“Typically if you grow up there and BYU makes that phone call, you’re going to go there and everyone wants you to go there,” said WSU coach Paul Pilkington. “But they kind of said ‘take a chance’ and it’s worked out well to have her in our program. It’s a very gifted running family but she has probably had the best career of her siblings. She’s also matured and been a really good team leader for us.”

It was far from a straight line from her strong freshman cross country season. A knee injury held her out of outdoor track that spring, then she left for Roseville, California, to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in August 2014.

She missed two full academic seasons and got back to training in February 2016, woefully far from elite running condition.

“When I came back from my mission and was so out of shape, I wasn’t even close to my freshman times and I kind of gave up on those goals for a bit,” Allen admitted.

By that fall, she was ready to compete but broke her foot in her second cross country race of the season. After rehab, she was able to suit up for outdoor track season in the spring of 2017, which is the first time she ran the steeplechase — logging a time of 11:19 in her first race and trimming that to 10:45 by season’s end.

Thomas Boyd, Associated Press

A year later in 2018, she got to 10:16 in the steeplechase and that’s when she started to believe, just a little bit, that she could reach times in the 9:40s.

She felt in great shape, but injured her shoulder on a bike ride that summer on a day when she was trying to take a day off running due to knee pain. She was able to return to run cross country that fall and got engaged to Christian Allen, a men’s WSU runner, in the winter.

Between that life change and a period where she says she wasn’t able to sleep well, her running times “tanked” so she redshirted the outdoor track season in spring of 2019.

She and Christian were married that summer as she made plans to use her final season of track eligibility in the spring of 2020.

But later in the summer of 2019, she learned she was pregnant. Not the plan, she says, but a welcome surprise.

“I was pretty terrified to tell Coach (Pilkington) I was pregnant. But he was super supportive from the beginning, he told me I’d come back stronger and quicker and I just kept telling myself that the whole time,” Allen said. “That really stuck with me. He’s just real honest, so when he tells you something you just believe it.”

Allen says she was able to keep running until she was six months pregnant when it became too painful. She stayed active on an elliptical bike and by going on hikes.

She gave birth to their son Miles — not an intentional track pun, she says, but a name that was on their short list that seemed to fit him best when they saw his face for the first time — that spring and was able to slowly start running a month later.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic was gripping the world and was just one more unanticipated detour in her running career. She pushed through pelvic pain for several months, determined to return to competition as the spring 2020 outdoor track season was canceled.

“After I got pregnant and had my baby, I think I realized if I’m going to come back, I want to make it worth it. I’m going to do everything I can to make these dreams a reality,” she said.

The pandemic pushed the next cross country season, scheduled for the fall of 2020, to the spring of 2021, which helped Allen return to form. She was one of three WSU women to run in a cross country race the Wildcats got approved to host on Nov. 6, 2020, in Morgan, and also gained confidence in a couple indoor races during the winter.

Those races, posting big personal records in practice time trials, and team meetings during down times where the women’s racers boosted each other with inspiration, prepared her to make school history in March at the NCAA cross country nationals, she says.

All of those things, however, might pale from the fortitude gained by carrying a pregnancy and giving birth — then learning how to be a mom while training to be an elite athlete.

“You gain a lot of mental toughness because you have to do a lot of things that you don’t want to do. That’s the definition of mental toughness, I think,” Allen said. “When you have a baby, you are waking up several times in the middle of the night to feed them and comfort them. You’re exhausted but you do it anyway. So when you get into workouts, it’s like yeah those are hard, but it’s not as hard as being a mom.

“You get comfortable with being uncomfortable, so being a mom is what creates that mental toughness.”

Pilkington says Allen is a “big-time runner when it’s a big meet. She is able to control the mental side and it makes her a great competitor at big meets.”

Allen says she used to doubt her speed and toughness, and would fudge in her mind the pacing goals Pilkington would give her for a race. But not anymore.

“He believes I can do it, he knows I’m in shape for this, so I just push the doubt out of my mind and just go for the times,” she said.

Allen says she’s incredibly grateful to be on the journey with Christian, a native of West Jordan who finished 12th in the Big Sky men’s cross country championships this season and runs distance races in outdoor track.

“He encourages me in my goals … it’s been awesome to have someone understand what I’m trying to accomplish and how much time and energy goes into it,” she said. “He’s the one who can get Miles calmed down if he wakes up in the middle of the night, there’s just so many things I feel like I wouldn’t be able to do without him.”

Pilkington says cross country and the 3,000-meter steeplechase are comparable enough races, so the quick turnaround this spring because of the delayed cross country season was tough, but doable — and that a seventh-place finish in cross country is a remarkably great achievement because distance runners of all ilks usually compete at the highest levels of cross country before breaking into individual events in the outdoor season.

He also said running in the same place a week later is a definite advantage not just in being familiar with the venue and routines but, in the steeplechase, the cut-in and angle of the water jump is different at every track.

Allen’s eighth-place finish last week at the NCAA national meet was the final outdoor track race of her college career but she still has eligibility left for cross country, which she will run in the coming fall and presumably be in a small group of favorites to contend for the individual national championship.

But that’s months away. The turnaround from NCAA nationals to the Olympic Trials is one week, but she and Pilkington were confident enough in her racing that he already had a training and recovery plan in place so she could return to Hayward Field and put her best foot forward.

So she’ll return to Oregon with Christian, Miles and other family members, doing all it takes to care for a 14-month-old, and try to stake her claim as one of the best steeplechase runners in the country.

“You see it with the pros sometimes because they’re older but in NCAA, we’re at nationals and there’s no one else there who is packing their baby around and is taking care of them,” Pilkington said. “She still manages to get her workouts done and balances things. That’s the big thing with her, is the balance between studying and school, taking care of a child, and running high mileage.

“She’s good and works hard, and she’s going to have a good running career beyond Weber.”

FOUR WILDCATS COMPETE

Allen is one of four current or former Weber State runners who qualified for this year’s Olympic Trials.

Kate Sorensen will return with Allen to Oregon from their trip last week and compete in the 400-meter hurdles. The first round of her event is at 4:35 p.m. MDT Friday, June 25.

Tawnie Moore, four-time Big Sky champion in the 100-meter hurdles, will race in that event. The Fremont High alum will run at 6:04 p.m. Saturday, June 19.

Jordan Cross is the lone WSU man at the trials. The Ogden High alum will run the 3,000-meter steeplechase, an event in which he won the Big Sky title in 2018, at 5:29 p.m. Monday, June 21.